Not so very long ago, probably around January this year, I was working on an article with the cheap yet upbeat title “10 reasons to learn Chinese in 2020”. Then 2020 came along, bulldozed my plan and the article died an early death. What bothered me the most though: I simply couldn’t think of any convincing reasons why 2020 should be the year to study Mandarin!
Was it just me? Or maybe studying Mandarin is just not as popular as it was before? I had to find out and looked at some data from trends.google.com that I want to share with you in this post. This website plots the popularity of any given search term on Google over time. The results were shocking.
Google data: popularity of learning Mandarin is in decline
Search term “learn Chinese”
I simply entered “learn Chinese”. What we see on the whole is a more or less steady decline, starting from 2005 (!), with a little peak at the beginning 2020 due to the Covid-19-pandemic. But could it really be that in 2005 studying Mandarin was more popular than say 2015? I had to have another try with a less vague search term.
Search term “learn Chinese for beginners”
What I got was more or less the same picture, the line dropping with ups and downs until 2013, then climbing up a little and then almost stabilizing on a low level. To get a more complete impression, I consulted the data for YouTube as well.
Popularity of learning Chinese on YouTube
As everybody knows YouTube has developed into an important platform for language learning, Mandarin Chinese being no exception. The YouTube data surprisingly shows a different picture. Between 2009 and 2017, the number of people looking for content to learn Chinese fluctuates on a relatively high level. Then the frequency of the search term suddenly drops in July 2017 with no sign of recovery. The exact same thing we get for the search term “learn Chinese”:
Just to double check, I entered the search term “living in China”, only to discover the same “crash” in July 2017:
What happened in 2017?
The YouTube data clearly indicates a downward trend that sets in from July 2017 and continues until this day. What happened in 2017 that had such on impact? My best guess is that Trump and the Sino-American Trade War happened, leading to much insecurity.
What about individual countries?
I chose to examine Google’s “global data” using English search terms. How about individual countries though?
Vietnam 
United Kingdom 
Germany 
Canada 
Australia 
USA
To my surprise, the general trend in these six countries is very similar. All charts indicate that the popularity of Mandarin is in decline.
Validity of data from Google Trends
I’m still not completely sure if the data give an accurate picture of the situation. It could for example well be that people’s search behavior on Google has become more sophisticated over time, which would (partly) explain the decreasing popularity of a search term “learn Chinese”. The YouTube data is probably more significant, but we still require more indicators to satisfyingly answer the question. HSK statistics revealing how many people have been taking the standard Mainland Chinese test over the last decade could be insightful for example. Let’s have a quick look.
HSK exam growing in popularity
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any up-to-date numbers, but the overall trend points towards growing popularity of the HSK exam:
This China Daily article even mentions 6.8 million test takers in 2018:
The HSK exams, a test of Chinese language proficiency organized by the Confucius Institute Headquarters, or Hanban, were taken 6.8 million times in 2018, up 4.6 percent from a year earlier, the Ministry of Education said on Friday.
China Daily (31.05.2019)
These HSK statistics obviously contradict the data I found and are somewhat reassuring, since it’s only logical that the language of a growing superpower has increasing significance in the world. And even though the interest in Mandarin may be waning in some parts of the world, this doesn’t necessarily mean that this a global trend. Take a look at African countries like Zambia for example where starting from 2020, Mandarin Chinese will form part of the Zambian high school curriculum.
Learning Mandarin becoming less popular – so what?
To end on a positive note here: even if it is true that fewer people are interested in studying Mandarin, why should we care? After all, when Mandarin skills and Chinese cultural competence are becoming more rare, people who do possess them become even more valuable. We need people who are proficient in the language and understand China’s culture and history. We have lots of challenges still ahead.
Is studying Mandarin becoming less popular? What do you think? Please feel free to leave a comment below.
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Is learning Chinese less popular now? I have no idea. Common sense tells me no. In my industry, companies have a hard time finding foreigners who can read Chinese. We are very sought after, hahaha.
Hi Marta, thanks for sharing your views on the matter. Good to know foreigners with Mandarin skills are still needed!^^ From other sources I also get the impression that Chinese still is a very popular language, despite some of the more recent developments in the world of politics. Lots of Chinese people ask me and other people why Mandarin is so popular among foreigners. Do you think “foreigners” are somehow less eager to live and work in China? (Let’s disregard for a moment that it’s difficult to enter the country)
I think the typical expat (middle aged man from a Western country with a family and a good position in an international company) is definitely less willing to move to China. And those companies are also less willing to bring them here because it’s very expensive (apart from their high salaries, those people want to live in very expensive villas, have a car and a driver, take their kids to international schools that cost over 20,000 Euro per year, etc etc). But young people from countries with not-so-good economic and employment prospects? China doesn’t look like a bad place at all for them…
Very interesting, I noticed that too. Some westerners seem to have extremely high standards. Good for China they don’t have to rely on imported laowai so much anymore. For others in possibly less privileged positions China is a country of hope and opportunity. Back in the day, some of my fellow students were from Vietnam, Thailand, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan and so on. They have many reasons to be focused on China. To them China is much more relevant than any far away western country, at least that was my impression back then.